It's never a good thing when the government decides to classify a document secret when the general populace expects it to be made public.

It happened in 2016 when the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on 1MDB was classified secret. Many Malaysians could not understand the rationale as the 1MDB issue was of great public interest.

But despite the public outcry, the former government stood its ground. It was mind-boggling as it was the first time ever that a report by the PAC was classified under the Official Secrets Act (OSA).

We hope the new Pakatan Harapan (PH) government will think carefully before classifying government documents secret. There must be very compelling reasons to do so. Such classification must be in public interest and not to cover up fraud or corruption as was done in the past.

Due to such abuse, we have had calls for the government to abolish the OSA. The Act was introduced to stop sensitive government secrets from falling into the wrong hands.